Something exciting for you today, folks, as our friends out at CBS Video sent over a copy of Flashpoint: The Fourth Season for us to review. If you’re looking for crime drama with a little extra, then you may well want a look at this one, as well as the rest of the series as well.

Flashpoint: The Fourth Season joins the men and women of the Strategic Response Unit, the part of the Toronto police department that handles the major stuff–stuff that you wouldn’t think actually happened in Toronto–like jailbreaks, bomb threats, that kind of thing. This season will prove no different as not only does the Strategic Response Unit find itself taking on not only troubles from outside the department, with the criminal element of the city fully engaged in all its various activities, but also from inside the department, as the personal lives of the various officers of the Strategic Response Unit come into play.

While indeed, “Flashpoint”–a Canadian creation that got picked up by Ion Television–is an exciting event, with plenty of not only drama, but also some thrills and action thrown in for variety, as well as a little soupcon of romance on the side, it’s also got a little something different not commonly found in cop shows. “Flashpoint”‘s truly unusual quality is its emphasis on technology. These cops are so laden with computers and radios that they fairly well clank when they walk, at least metaphorically. Flashpoint is less a cop show than it is a bizarre tech demo of the very latest in portable technology, as well as some of the latest in stationary technology. It’s downright amazing how much stuff they’re carrying, and sufficient to make me wonder if they should be showing some brand names on this stuff to get product placement dollars out of the arrangement.

There are some excellent twists coming in on this one too, some real surprises, and for cop drama that can be pretty rare. It’s very interesting to see just what’s going on with fairly standard material in completely different countries. The Canadian spin on things is similar in a lot of ways, but also with some surprising changes that make this one one to watch.

Flashpoint: The Fourth Season will do a very nice job of holding interest, and will throw enough twists and strangenesses into the mix to make it compelling. It will be sufficiently left of center to make it look much more unique than may be expected, and in turn, should be well worth watching.